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Mike Argento: Newtown shooting further stigmatizes people with mental illness

MIKE ARGENTO

Updated:
12/18/2012 05:05:52 PM EST

Flowers and toys lay near the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, Russia, Saturday, Dec. 15, 2012. The massacre of 26 children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary school elicited horror and soul-searching around the world even as it raised more basic questions about why the gunman, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, would have been driven to such a crime and how he chose his victims. (Associated Press)

It had to be something. A sane person, a person with a healthy mind, a person whose brain is not broken, doesn't go to an elementary school and shoot children. The act itself speaks of madness, the action illustrates something went very wrong. No rational mind could conceive such horror, much less perpetrate it.

There was talk that he had been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, a form of autism, as if being afflicted with that neurological disorder explained everything. It doesn't. People suffering from Asperger typically are not violent. It had to be something else.

There were reports that Lanza was socially withdrawn, wouldn't make eye contact with people and was just plain "weird," as one acquaintance described him. Another acquaintance described strange behavior and took to Twitter to say, "Adam Lanza has been a weird kid since we were five years old. As horrible as this was, I can't say I am surprised."

A relative told reporters he was "obviously not well."

Obviously.

We may never know. Forensic experts can dig through the record he left behind for clues. But there doesn't appear to be anything, yet, that can come close to explaining what happened inside this kid's mind, what turned him into a monster.

And even if he had not ended his own life as police closed in, we might have never known.

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Others who have committed acts of madness - the shooters in Tucson and Aurora come to mind - have provided no clues other than disease so severe that it can make the unspeakable plausible in the mind of the afflicted.

When these massacres happen, it shows us that despite millennia spent trying to plumb the workings of the mind, we know so little. Scientists have studied behavior and have examined the brains of the ill. Psychiatrists have probed and prodded the consciousness. Philosophers have tried to explain how an irrational mind reacts to an irrational world. Nothing comes close to explaining it. Nothing comes close to giving us a glimpse into the mind of a person who has the capacity to put a 6-year-old in his gun sights and pull the trigger. Nothing.

All we can do is treat the symptoms. And even then, we fall short.

The history of treating people with mental illness is horrible. For centuries, mental disorders were seen as a moral or character failure, that the afflicted wasn't a human being in the grips of disease, but a person who had to be removed from polite society. In the past, people with mental illness were locked up, to better protect the sane from what was believed to be - and judging from the words being used to described Lanza, is still believed in some quarters - their capacity for committing evil acts.

Even though that stigma still exists, and is reinforced by acts committed by ill people who get their hands on weapons of mass mayhem, we evolved. We no longer lock up the mentally ill. But that doesn't mean we treat them well either. Or, in some cases, have any idea how to treat them. Or, in yet other cases in which we know how to treat them, we decide we can't afford it.

And whenever something like this happens - with startling frequency - the stigma is reinforced, that mentally ill people commit violent acts.

I talked with Rose Alberghini about mental health care. Rose is director of the local office of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. She also has bipolar disorder.

Rose Alberghini (File)

She fights that stereotype, but whenever a mentally ill person commits a heinous act, it chips away at any work she's done.

"It makes people think that people with mental illness are dangerous," she said. "That's not the issue. People who do not have mental illnesses commit more acts of violence than people with mental illnesses."

In Lanza's case, she's not sure what happened. She didn't know enough about him or whether he got any treatment or what treatment he may have received to judge. She knows that he was bounced from school to school as teachers and his mother tried to find a place that would be good for him. Stories have also surfaced that his mother struggled with her son's illness, becoming more isolated herself. And she may have had her own problems. She had stockpiled guns and survival gear in anticipation of civilization's collapse and the notion that the president would be coming for her firearms. For years, according to reports, she had taken her son, troubled as he was, to shooting ranges and taught him to shoot.

Alberghini can't address the specifics, but she did say that it wasn't unusual for parents to suffer their child's mental illness - denial, confusion, pain, all part of the routine.

She also does know that gaining access to mental health care is difficult. In most cases, people suffering from mental illness first receive treatment at the emergency room after a crisis. That's akin to only seeking treatment for a broken leg after it turns gangrenous.

And it's getting more difficult. Funding for mental health services has declined by $1.6 since 2009 - caused by the decline in the economy, the same decline that has produced a spike in the need for mental health services. Local mental health agencies have had to do more with less, fewer caseworkers managing more clients, a perfect recipe for disaster as some may slip through the cracks.

In Lanza's case, we don't know what effect, if any, those cuts had. His mother was affluent, having hit the divorce jackpot, living off of more than $220,000 a year in child support and alimony from her wealthy ex-husband. His mother could afford care and treatment. Whether it was available, or whether she sought it, is not known yet.

We've heard the word "evil" tossed around to describe Lanza.

"I don't look at it that way," Alberghini said. "I don't look at him as evil. This was clearly a troubled person."

Mike Argento's column appears Mondays and Fridays in Living and Sundays in Viewpoints. Reach him at mike@ydr.com or 771-2046. Read more Argento columns at www.ydr.com/mike. Or follow him on Twitter at FnMikeArgento.